Month: July 2016

It was great to see so many of you at our networking and juvenile justice policy event last week!

We were honored to have Naoka Carey, Executive Director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice, and Erin Freeborn, Executive Director of Communities for Restorative Justice, lead an informative discussion on the Massachusetts juvenile justice system. State Senate President Stanley Rosenberg was also in attendance, which shows how important these issues are to our political leadership.

Going by the numbers, America is heavily invested in jailing our youth: on average, $88,000 per year is spent to keep a child in prison1 – far more than is spent to keep a child in school2. The establishment of a criminal record, no matter how trivial the initial offense, severely limits future opportunities and indeed makes it highly likely that the child will fail to break out of the cycle of poverty as an adult3, instead propagating a poor man’s samsara. As new research sheds light on the adolescent brain and its continuing development well beyond the traditional threshold of eighteen years4, we must revisit what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, especially in the case of the most vulnerable among us.

It has been a while since our last newsletter! The Roosevelt@Boston core team has been hard at work recruiting new grads from campus chapters and supporting the Roosevelt Institute’s Next Generation Blueprint for 2016. The Blueprint (you can access the full version here) outlines the top policy issues and priorities for legislators based on a survey of 1,000 young people on 160 campuses across the country — it’s definitely worth a read!